By 2008, SpaceX had launched three rockets. They all failed to make it into orbit. Shortly after the third failure, Elon Musk was interviewed by Wired Magazine’s Carl Hoffman:

Wired.com: At the end of the day you’re still zero for three; you have so far failed to put a rocket into orbit.

Musk: We haven’t gotten into orbit, true, but we’ve made considerable progress. If it’s an all-or-nothing proposition then we’ve failed. But it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?

Musk: Do I sound optimistic?

Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.

Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

Yesterday, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station.

Good follow up to the previous quote I posted.

60 Minutes: When you had that third failure in a row, did you think, I need to pack this in?

Elon Musk: Never.

60: Why not?

E: I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or, completely incapacitated.

60: Do you believe that your rocket will be the next American rocket to send an astronaut to space?

E: I believe that is the most likely outcome, yes.

60: When critics say you can’t do this, your response to them is…

E: We’ve done this.

—Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and many more.

You’ve probably heard the news, he recently successfully launched the Dragon and attached it to the ISS.

Definitely one of the most inspirational entrepreneurs I’ve found.

For example, in this page from The Moral Animal by Richard Wright, which I read about 2 years ago, I circled the words “resurgent,” “implicit,” and “emanations.” All three of these words are now, more or less, a part of my normal vocabulary. I find this very motivating.

Harris goes on to describe the detrimental effects of burning a fireplace, claiming that doing so is more harmful that smoking cigarettes for everyone around you, and causes so much pollution that “even libertarians should be willing to pass a law prohibiting the recreational burning of wood in favor of cleaner alternatives (like gas).” This claim, at least to me, is extraordinary, and thus requires extraordinary evidence. His claim seems to be supported by at least three published journal articles:

The toxicology of inhaled woodsmoke. “…exposure to woodsmoke, particularly for children, represents a potential health hazard.”

Woodsmoke health effects: a review. “It is now well established, however, that wood-burning stoves and fireplaces as well as wildland and agricultural fires emit significant quantities of known health-damaging pollutants, including several carcinogenic compounds. Two of the principal gaseous pollutants in woodsmoke, CO and NOx, add to the atmospheric levels of these regulated gases emitted by other combustion sources. Health impacts of exposures to these gases and some of the other woodsmoke constituents (e.g., benzene) are well characterized in thousands of publications.”

Respiratory health effects associated with exposure to indoor wood burning in developing countries. “Inhalation of these pollutants may have serious consequences, which are highlighted in this paper, for the respiratory health of the people who have been exposed.”

I find a certain romanticism in the project of hauling a felled tree from a friend’s yard, chopping and stacking it in neat rows, and then building a warm air of sentimentality during the winter. Yet, regardless of the health implications, the point of Harris’ article is to highlight the visceral reaction to a hard-truth of science when it flies in the face of our long-held and sentimental beliefs:

“Of course, if you are anything like my friends, you will refuse to believe this. And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion.”

You’d have to be living in a cave if you still haven’t heard of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. After numerous conversations with friends about the protests, I’ve decided to write this article. I’ll cover the origin of the protests, what the protesters stand for and want (as hard as that is to discern), the logic of their claims, and considerations for whether or not you should join their movement.

I’ll do my best to present the logic in clear terms. Remember, I’m a skeptical empiricist, and that should come out in my writing and analysis. Don’t confuse skepticism for a bias. After the logic is laid bare, I would implore you to use your full capacity for reason to come to your own, well-informed conclusion. At that point, it’s up to you to decide whether to accept or reject reason.

The Origin of the Movement

On July 13th, 2011, the Canadian-based Adbusters Media Foundation posted the following on their blog (their emphasis):

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

By “emerging stratagem” they are referring to the formula behind the protests in Tahrir, Egypt and Barcelona, Spain. Adbusters claim that the Tahrir protests worked because they had a singular purpose: to get rid of Mubarak. Absolutely zero evidence is provided for this claim.

The “financial Gomorrah of America” is a Biblical reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, Kingdoms in Canaan associated with sin, degradation, and God’s wrath. (The English word “sodomy” has obvious origins.) So what is Adbusters really saying here? According to Wikipedia, “the term [Wall Street] has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or signifying New York-based financial interests.” By associating Wall Street with Gomorrah, Adbusters is claiming that the corporations and financial markets of America have become the most sinful and degraded part of the American empire.

After the original blog post, the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, or simply #OWS, exploded in popularity. Check out the following graph from Google Trends:

The term “occupy wall street” gained traction around the second half of September, and by October the news outlets were all over it. A quick search reveals 111 million results in Google, with 1.64 million in the past 24 hours at the time of writing. To say that the Adbusters’ campaign “tipped” would be an understatement.

The Occupy protests have since grown into a global movement. On October 15th, rallies were staged in Rome, Paris, Sãu Paulo, Hong Kong, and more cities worldwide, albeit typically in smaller fashion than the American protests.

OWS has entered the popular culture: an episode on South Park, Occupy Sesame Street, and Occupy Narnia. The Occupy Wall Street Protests even have a Protest Song (kinda).

What the Protesters Want

As Nassim Taleb notes in the above video, the protesters don’t have a solid message. Contrary to the wishes of the Adbusters, the movement doesn’t have a singular purpose like the protests in Tahrir did.

This could pose a huge problem. Without a definite aim or purpose, it is easy to imagine how mob mentality could reign over the protesters. From the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver to the Reign of Terror that swept over France in late 1700, we are well aware of the detriment of mob mentality. It is very possible that the protesters would give way to unreasonable rioting.

Besides the ambiguity of their message, the protesters seem to want social and economic equality, a smaller government without financial interests in Wall Street, less unemployment, and bank reform.

The Logic of the Protests: Fallacies and Misconceptions

When approaching a tender issue, such as the OWS movement, it is always best to remain skeptical and critically examine every claim. I’ve scoured the news sources and analyzed the OWS claims as best I could. Surely, I’ve missed some things (I will be updating this post in the future), but below I listed as many of the fallacious arguments I could find regarding the protests.

Genetic fallacy. Simply put, the origin of an issue is irrelevant to its merit. It would be easy to conclude that the Adbusters’ campaign is invidious and unpatriotic because it originated in Canada, by a somewhat radical non-profit “Culturejammer Journal,” but that conclusion would be fallacious. This is an opposing position that we do not want to take.

False dichotomy. Oversimplification sometimes leads to a situation in which only two options are considered, when in fact many more possibilities exist. These two options are usually diametrically opposed. A perfect example of a false dichotomy is illustrated in the below quote from the Adbusters’ original OWS blog post (my emphasis):

“If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.“

In reality, our government mustn’t choose between only “the will of the people” and “the lucre of the corporations.” Indeed, those two options need not necessarily be opposed. I’m no expert in economics, but even I know that there are many more options for economic policy than the two options that Adbusters gives us.

Appeal to Emotion. Perhaps the most persuasive—and insidious—logical fallacy is the appeal to emotion, and Adbusters exploited this extensively in their original blog post. Return to the above quote and notice that they begin by illustrating the opposition: “against every police and National Guard effort to expel us.” They use opposition as a motivating factor. And then, when the supposed opposition arrests and pepper sprays the protestors, the appeal to emotion is only strengthened. (Sidenote: This use of opposition is also a motivation strategy in war, as Robert Green describes in his 33 Strategies of War.)

Also take note of the words that the Adbusters chose. The “lucre of the corporations”; lucre implies some filthy or dishonorable action. The fact that the entire blog post reads like a rallying speech, with powerful, emotional words, is a great cause for concern.

So, how do I deal with dogmatic OWSers?

Sometimes you may find yourself in a discussion with someone that is not yet aware of the logical fallacies of the OWS movement. You know: dogmatists, fanatics, and those that simply can’t understand why you aren’t out there protesting with everyone else. When you begin questioning the basic assumptions of the movement (as any rational person would), they typically stare at you with their mouth gaping, eyebrows furrowed, wide-eyed in shock.

So how do you deal with these people? Pretty much the same way you deal with any other fanatic or fundamentalist: Socratically and diplomatically question and investigate their claims until they arrive at a contradiction, or they commit one of the fallacies I listed above. Be prepared to encounter heated words and flared tempers. Don’t worry, just keep your calm and continue questioning their logic.

Peter Schiff does a pretty good job in the following video:

Thanks for reading! I’ll be updating this post in the future (or with future posts). I’ve tried to make this account as objective and unbiased as possible. If you see any factual or other errors, please let me know in the comments and I’ll make changes accordingly.

Image credit: My friend Jacob Kramer, administer of the Atheist page on Facebook.

Around 170 A.D., Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Pride is a master of deception: when you think you’re occupied in the weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.” Even in religion, “pride” is listed as the most detrimental of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride is the insidious parasite that sidles into your consciousness when, as Marcus said, you believe too strongly that the work you do is all-important. Examples from history abound: Maximilien Robespierre, after spearheading the French Revolution and sending the royal family to the guillotine, tried to push his deistic beliefs—“the Cult of the Supreme Being”—on the French citizenry, and was promptly sent to the guillotine himself; Cyrus the Younger, in an attempt to usurp the title King of Persia from his brother, Ataxerxes II, was slain by his own blood in a civil war; Louis Borders, co-founder of Borders Bookstores, had all the money, investors, and connections needed to create a successful online grocery delivery service, but Webvan nonetheless failed in plain view, in fact voted the largest dot-com flop in history by CNET.

“Pride is a master of deception: when you think you’re occupied in the weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.”
—Marcus Aurelius

The common thread amongst all of the above examples is the extreme sense of pride that one’s ambitions could not possibly go awry. Every failure believes that they are meant to be doing the work they’re consumed by; and if they fail—no, when they fail—they fail in grandiose fashion.

This is the thought that occupies the back of my mind as people talk of “American Pride.” I’m sure al-Qaeda had pride in the job they did on September 11th. Who’s to say that their pride is wrong and ours is right? Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals obviously comes to mind: “While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself.’” This “slave morality”—Is it not the same morality that says No to those races that are different from ours? Is it not the same morality that condemned “colored people” for centuries? Is it not the same morality that manifests in the typical portrayal of “pride in one’s country”?

“…slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself.’”
—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

I’ve always observed that the overwhelming majority of people don’t know why they do or think what they do or think, and this is obviously the case in how Muslims are portrayed in the media. Maybe this is just the macro manifestation of a mob mentality gone completely apeshit crazy over a threat to their precious pride: the reporters need a story, and the American Pride is always a good headline, so even now, ten years after the threat, we rejoice over the loss of a life, we celebrate over the murder of a man of our own species. Or perhaps this is the kind of anti-cosmopolitan world we live in: whenever there is an inter-race conflict, the media will serve as cheerleaders to our cause, as a rallying point for our narcissistic, head-phone-wearing, screen-staring, detached generation that won’t dare to step outside its cultural vacuum.

Or maybe, just maybe, we can find a thought leader that has actually studied the classical philosophies and histories—not simply trained to smile in front of audiences and preach hope—and appreciates, no, affirms and embraces the cultural diversity that will collide with our generation like a plane into a building.

Let’s instead take a step back and learn from the man that wrote the book on cultural synergy, Cosmopolitanism. In the following clip from Examined Life, Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about how to reconcile clashing cultural customs with ever-growing globalization. I beg of you, watch the video, and then read the book. It’s that important.

Seven o’clock de la mañana. Tuesday, November 5th.

Susan slips out of bed, into her day clothes, and makes for the polls. Today would be the first day she voted. Finally! After all this time! She had been waiting her whole life—she was too nervous to even eat breakfast.

A few months later, many people would ask her why she voted. She would answer—and did answer to all twenty-nine of the towns and villages of Monroe county, and twenty-one towns in Ontario county—

“For however destructive in their happiness this government might become, a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and rebellion.”¹

Indeed, Susan voted. Thoreau would be proud: “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”²

Lysander Spooner says that “a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.”³ Wow! Now that is a statement I can agree with! Spooner and Thoreau were contemporaries and certainly we can see parallels in their ideas and philosophy. Perhaps Susan enjoyed Walden as well—she was an intelligent Female of the Species.

But she was still female! “And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him / Must command but may not govern—shall enthrall but not enslave him.”⁴ Is voting not governing—participating in government? What’s going on here?

Back to Spooner: “And there is no difference, in principle—but only in degree—between political and chattel slavery.” So Susan is not a contradiction, she is a noble, in the Nietzschian sense. She overcame the imposed regime within her own writ as a human being, as the owner of herself. She enjoyed the vivid sense of life that few experience.

Susan B. Anthony ate tyranny for breakfast. She swallowed it whole, rejecting the notion that any inherited supremacy could crush her intrinsic rights: “for if a [wo]man has never consented or agreed to support a government, [s]he breaks no faith in refusing to support it.”³ A leader she was, infamously on the run. Maybe not in the John Brown-sense, but she inspired perhaps scores of women to cast the illegal ballot.

And so it is—What makes a leader?—the audacity to break the norms. The will to overcome that which does not make sense in the subjective valuation of the leader. When the leader necessitates overcoming an imposed regime, they are not acting tyrannical, but in fact they are an open and diplomatic enemy. That is the American way, after all—diplomacy, politics, compromise. And audacity.

(Photo 1 — Jeevay)

(Photo 2 — Banksy)

As a student of both philosophy and medicine, I see two very different teaching strategies on a daily basis.

My philosophy classes are almost always approached in the same manner: through the readings, I am exposed to a multitude of different perspectives on a single issue. I must then synthesize the arguments and write an original paper that discusses everything I’ve learned and concludes with my own philosophical thoughts, all filtered through a critical lens. These classes stress original, critical thinking, and I don’t think you can argue against the virtue of that.

In my (admittingly rudimentary) medical classes, however, we never read primary sources or discuss the concepts we are learning. The professor shows a powerpoint that basically outlines the textbook for two hours in a 200-person lecture hall. When students are brave enough to speak in class, it’s either a “I once had [insert condition]” woe-is-me story, a useless “Will this be on the test” question, or someone just trying to sound smart. Nobody dares to think critically. Oh god no. That would require too much effort.

It’s a question of epistemology, really

My biggest concern isn’t that my medicine classes don’t provoke me to think critically—I can do that on my own. My qualm is with the way I am evaluated. First, my professors apparently don’t care if I can critically evaluate another’s conclusions, which is disturbing to say the least. Second, the exams become a guessing game, requiring only rote memorization and no real synthesis of new knowledge.

In a philosophy class, I know exactly what is most important in any reading or argument because I also know the counter-argument—that is, I have a point of reference and comparison, and I can argue both sides of the issue if need be. But, when the end goal of my medical classes—the exam—is an unknown, such as a blank Scanton sheet, then I cannot know for sure what is relevant.

And so, preparation for a Scantron exam literally becomes a guessing game. I have no idea what will be on the test, and I can only guess as to what the professor deems to be important enough to make the cut.

Honestly, I haven’t figured out a fool-proof strategy for coping with this unknown. So far, I’ve resorted to reading every paper I can get my hands on through my institution. One in particular that I’ve recently enjoyed: Nutrition and Alzheimer’s disease: The detrimental role of a high carbohydrate diet.

But this can be fixed…

This seems to be such an obvious problem with an obvious solution that I can’t believe I haven’t seen this somewhere before (or maybe I have, and just forgot).

The solution: 80% of the class should be rote memorization and learning, while the remaining 20% should be dedicated to original research, reading of primary sources, and otherwise exploring the medical literature. If this is too difficult in a large lecture setting, then use the lab section that most medical classes have anyway. They could even be peer-reviewed by other students or TAs.

Personally, I think that would work. But feel free to argue against me, this is a topic that I think needs to be addressed.